Sunday, June 2, 2013

Common core's claims are false

Instead of dealing with the real problem, the common core
offers us, in the words of Susan Ohanian, “a radical
untried curriculum overhaul and … nonstop national testing.”

The common core movement is
based on these claims:

(1) Our educational system is
broken, as revealed by US students' scores on international tests; (2) We must
improve education to improve the economy;(3) The way to improve education is to have national standards accompanied
by tests that enforce the standards.

Each of these claims is false.

(1)Our schools are not broken. The problem is
poverty. When researchers control for poverty, our test scores are among the
best in world. Our unspectacular overall scores are due to the fact that the US
has the second highest level of child poverty among all 34 economically
advanced countries (now over 23%, compared to high-scoring Finland’s 5.4%).
Poverty means poor nutrition, inadequate health care, and lack of access to
books, among other things. All of these negatively impact school performance.

(2)Existing evidence strongly suggests that
improving the economy improves children's educational outcomes, not vice-versa,
supporting Martin Luther King’s position: "We are likely to find that the
problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of
poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished”(Martin
Luther King, 1967, Final Words of Advice).

(3)There is no evidence that standards and increased
testing have improved student learning in the past.

No educator is opposed to
assessments that help students to improve their learning. The amount of testing
proposed in connection to standards is, however, astonishing, far more than the
already excessive amount demanded by NCLB: US Department of Education documents
show that testing will be expanded to include all subjects that can be tested
and more, perhaps all, grade levels. There will be “interim” tests given
through the year and there may be pretests in the fall to measure growth,
defined as increases in standardized test scores.

The cost of implementing standards and electronically
delivered national tests will be enormous, bleeding money from legitimate investments
that have been demonstrated to actually help children. According to media
reports, New York City and the State of Florida are each budgeting a half a
billion dollars just to connect children to the internet so that they can take
tests. And we can be sure that as soon as the equipment (the “infrastructure”) is
set up, it will be declared obsolete. The boondoggle will never end.

This money should be spent to
protect children from the effects of poverty, i.e. on expanded and improved
breakfast and lunch programs, improved health care (at present there are more
school nurses per child in low poverty schools than in high poverty schools)
and improved school and public libraries, especially in high-poverty areas. The
best teaching in the world will have little effect when children are hungry,
undernourished, ill, and have little access to reading material.

Investing
in protecting our children from the effects of poverty, rather than on
standards and tests, will improve school achievement. We would be feeding the
animal, not just weighing it.

Libraries: Krashen, S., Lee, SY, and McQuillan, J. 2012.
Is The Library Important? Multivariate Studies at the National and
International Level Journal of Language and Literacy Education: 8(1). http://jolle.coe.uga.edu/

These are some great points made here by Stephen Krashen. I'd also add that it would be wiser to invest in getting rid of the mismanagement, corruption, nepotism, cronyism in the nation's largest public school districts before going full speed with this farce of "education reform" by the corporatists who are only salivating for the goods, products, services, etc. Don't think it's not there? One can do a number of things to come to that conclusion: You can read Lydia G. Segal's pivotal work, "Battling Corruption in America's Public Schools"; pour through the R.I.C.O. investigation indictment that recently went down in Atlanta, Georgia that brought down administrators and educators alike and demonstrated that it was more than just a "cheating scandal" -- the mantra the media keeps reporting and readers keep repeating; or, in Chicago, read Chicago Public Schools Inspector General Sullivan's most recent yearly report which has him stating that "The cases reported this year are especially important because the results show that fraud is being committed by high-level and highly paid CPS administrators and that the lucrative federal and state benefits tied to the forms drives the fraud," as cited by the Chicago Tribune. You can also read this essay that gives you a pretty comprehensive idea of what the nation's third largest public schools district challenges are really being faced: http://www.scribd.com/doc/106337306/THE-CHICAGO-PUBLIC-SCHOOLS-ALLERGIC-TO-ACTIVISM